ATI Display Drivers

This article discusses the open-source Radeon and RadeonHD display drivers.

Determining your hardware

Run this command to determine what kind of video card you have:

lspci -v | grep VGA

Supported Cards

The radeon driver supports R100/R200 (Radeon 7000 – Radeon 9250) and R300/R400/R500 (Radeon 9500 – Radeon X1950) class chips. See the radeon page on the X wiki for more information. The radeonhd driver is for R500 and newer cards. See the the radeonhd page on the X wiki for more info.

Installing proprietary firmware

You may need to install proprietary firmware if you have one of the following Radeon-based cards:

The firmware in question, id est the CP/PFP microcode, can be installed by first enabling the non-free repository for your Debian release and issuing the following command:

aptitude install linux-firmware

Currently this package is only available for lenny, squeeze, and sid.

Enabling 3D acceleration

These notes are for an Xorg based ?xserver. To install the ATI Radeon drivers on an XFree86 installation, see ?ATIHowToXFree86.

ATI Radeon cards 8500,9000,9200 and 9250 work with Open Source drivers and support ?OpenGL 3D Graphics.

To configure X to use accelerated 3d drivers, the configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf should be edited as follows:

 Section "Device"
        Identifier      "ATI 3D"
        Driver          "ati"
 EndSection

 Section "Screen"
        Device          "ATI 3D"

Install the required libraries

It is necessary to install driver libraries, in order for the 3D capabilities of the card to be utilized:

 apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri

questions

glxinfo|grep render

See Also

?ATIHowToXFree86 Configuring XFree86 to use ATI 3D accelerated graphics

ATIProprietary Installing the closed source proprietary driver